There are distinct stages in a writer’s career. The first comes with reading. As the passion grows the desire to know follows. How are books written?
This is the dawn of critical thought. It takes some doing. Or rather, studying. Some skip this step and go right to writing. Good luck with that. Lacking a critical compass, you love everything you write. Then spend your life wondering why no one else does.
But if the fledgling writer applies himself or herself, is diligent and honest, works hard at understanding economy of diction, word choice, paragraph structure, punctuation, and about four hundred other things, he or she begins to acquire some fundamental knowledge. This is the next stage. The most dangerous stage.
The writing itself.
My advice? Quit. Just quit. Stop and go back to reading. You’ll be happier and healthier. Especially healthier.
But some can’t leave the idea alone. You lay awake at night. Your job as an insurance adjuster or medical tech is no longer interesting. Friends talk but you don’t listen. Vacations, restaurants, politics are boring. Going to Disney World seems stupid. It always seemed stupid, but now especially so.
Life has changed. Fundamentally. Irrevocably.
Now nothing sounds right. Email punctuation is double- and triple-checked. Notes in birthday cards are shortened. Writing a few scenes, you craft sentences substituting the word effete for weak. Then go back to weak. After all, The Writer’s Guide to Writing says use common words. Damn that thing.
In desperation you give up and go back to reading. Thank god for reading. Pouring a cup of tea you pick up a favorite Stephen King novel. But something’s wrong. Sentences go on and on. King tells instead of shows. He’s classist, sexist, political, profane. Everything he warns against in his own book, On Writing: a Memoir. So much for that guide.
You try some other favorites. But it’s the same with Emily Henry, Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling. No one can write. They’re doing it all wrong. Which leads to the final stage.
You have to write the book yourself.
The first chapters are clumsy, difficult. But you get better. And better. You take a class, join a writer’s group. Before long you can out-write any of them. Including your instructors. Do you have a knack? Who knows?
You’re fast, at least you have that. As an exercise the group will submit a story to a small magazine. They give each other a month. You finish that night. Off the ms. goes to The Schadenfreude Review. Accepted! It’s just an online journal that won’t be around for long, but hey, you’ve been published. At the group’s next meeting you turn on your laptop and show them. Wrinkled noses. A few half-hearted congrats. Schadenfreude is right.
What lies ahead? Loneliness. Obsession. Whole sequences, stories, chapters painstakingly crafted, then deleted. Doubt. Misery. In the end it makes no difference. You are doing the one thing you were born to do.
You are A Writer. Welcome to the happy club.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com